Hello Dave, You post is VERY long indeed. I will try to have a short post, and perhaps later if there are more comments from others.
Perhaps you might want to think why you have English as your first langauge now, and so am I. We both grew up in countries that once belong to the British Empire. In a way, if I am correct so is Cananda, Australia, NZ and many countries in the African continent etc. etc. etc. (as I am not too sure about the US, so I will let someone tell me ...I know for sure historically, you escape having to learn Dutch as first language!! So what if you speak English, come to Holland and I will assure you you can surve quite well with English, but you would be quite lost and many other things. Like me). So, what shall we do with people that was once the colonies of Spaiin, Portugal, France, Belgium, the Netheralnds to name a few? OR those that were too uninteresting to be a colony for any one of the OLD countries? According to your theory, does that mean ALMOST all of South American should drop their own langauge and learn English instead? Or the Chinese with 1.6 billiongs citizen should ignore their own language? What about Indonesia combined with Malaysia? or the German which has more millions of inhabitans than NL (only 16 millions therefore anyone can bully them into dropping their own langauge and stick to English). How about the French? They too have many former colonies in the African continent, Vietnam, Haiti, even a tiny portion of Cananda??? I don't think the French or the German are going to agree with you. German is spoken in more than just Germany. Now I just remember, Italy is another big country! And Portugal would join hand with Brazil, and Macao (tiny but ..) India is a unique case, perhaps, because Indians NEVER agreed to have one of their own language to represent thier country, instead they are using English as their official languae. You cannot say that about China. China has united their language to Mandarin since, I don't know, many centuries ago. Therefore, is it right to ask them to drop their own official/native language? Take the case of Indonesia, the country has a very lopsided rich vs. poor. Therefore the rich would not have problem with using English as defacto IT language since most of them would have had the chance of studying in the US, Australia, Canada etc. They have money. AND if they cannot speak the langauge, they can always hire someone to translate for them. I don't really know the percentage of rich vs. poor in that country. But I am quite sure it is something around the region of 10% vs 90% poor. So, what are we going to do with the poor? Ask all of them to learn another language? Forget about if it technically doable, is it ethically correct? After all we are talking about solving digital divide to leap-frog the poor. Why then the burden should be on the poor? OK. I am going to stop here. I will see if anyone would send in their arguement about the economic side etc. etc. Do not forget as well, Indonesia is one of the countries that are going to order 100 millions of the 100$ lap-top. Cindy [EMAIL PROTECTED] ============= [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
